Dentofacial surgery, also referred to as oral and maxillofacial surgery, is often employed to correct a wide spectrum of diseases, injuries and defects in the head, neck, face, jaws and the hard and soft tissues of the oral and maxillofacial region of humans or other non-human patients. As capabilities of computers and software improve, practitioners of dentofacial surgery increasingly use computer-aided dentofacial imaging tools in order to model dentofacial features of patients, diagnose diseases, injuries, and defects, plan dentofacial surgical procedures and other treatments, and educate patients regarding diagnoses and treatments.
For example, to plan and simulate a dentofacial surgery, a practitioner may, with the aid of a computer-aided tool, virtually modify various bones or bone segments of the patient via a user interface of a computer. Such computer-aided planning and simulation may allow a practitioner to simulate effect of various surgical adjustments on a patient, including effects on a patient's aesthetic appearance. However, traditional computer-aided surgical planning and simulation tools have significant disadvantages. For example, digital images of a patient's facial tissues generated by imaging devices may include undesirable noise and other artifacts. Thus, many traditional planning and simulation tools allow a practitioner to perform “cleaning” of a digital image to remove noise from the image. However, such cleaning of noise is complicated due to the non-linear and three-dimensional shapes of the tissues comprising a human head. As another example, traditional planning and simulation tools typically allow a practitioner to make two-dimensional surgical adjustments of bone and generate a simulated two-dimensional soft-tissue response based on such adjustments, which does not allow the practitioner to view a three-dimensional model of the soft-tissue response.